Killer Pad

When three friends find a sweet deal on a mansion in Hollywood Hills, they think they have struck party gold. But their dreams of sexy Hollywood ladies are quickly thwarted when they realize their dream pad is also a direct portal to Hell.

Direct Contact

Dolph Lundgren might not be as famous as Stallone or Schwarzenegger, but he’s still got enough credibility and killed enough people on-screen to be considered one of the great action heroes. Unfortunately, like many of the great action heroes, he’s stuck with DVDs now and hasn’t been seen in cinema for years.

Live Free or Die

Its not the crime, its the cover-up. In small-town, hard-scrabble New Hampshire, foul-mouthed all-talk slacker John Rugged Rudgate fancies himself a criminal. When a local plumber stares him down at a pub, Rugged vows revenge, pouring brake fluid in the mans water supply. When the man dies from unrelated causes, Rugged and his side-kick, the even dimmer Jeff, try to cover up what they think is murder. One bad decision begets another.

Go Get Some Rosemary aka Daddy Longlegs

After months of being alone, sad, busy, sidetracked, free, lofty, late and away from his kids, Lenny, 34 with graying frazzled hair, picks his kids up from school. Every year he spends a couple of weeks with his sons Sage, 9, and Frey, 7. Lenny juggles his kids and everything else all within a midtown studio apartment in New York City. He ultimately faces the choice of being their father or their friend all with the idea that these two weeks must last 6 months. In these two weeks, a trip upstate, visitors from strange lands, a mother, a girlfriend, magic blankets, and complete lawlessness seem to take over their lives. The film is a swan song to excuses and responsibilities to fatherhood and self-created experiences, and to what its like to be truly torn between being a child and being an adult.

Doc Hollywood

Benjamin Stone is a young doctor driving to L.A where he was offered a new job as a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. He gets off the highway to avoid a traffic jam, but gets lost and ends up crashing into a fence in the small town of Grady. He is sentenced to 32 hrs of community service at the local hospital. All he wants is to serve the sentence and get moving, but gradually the locals become attached to the new doctor, and he falls for the pretty ambulance driver, Lou. Will he leave?

Churchill: The Hollywood Years

This is a comedy involving a group of the American filmmakers who decided to make a movie about Winston Churchilles life but missed with the casting. They find out that an actor to play the key role is a robust, unattractive cigar smoker they draw in an American G.I. as he seemed to be a better-looking actor to play the part of Churchill. A new interpretation the makers developed depicts a handsome Churchill falling in love with Princess Elizabeth, who is herself involved in the war as an undercover agent.

It's a Free World..

Angie (Kierston Wareing), a young woman frustrated after being fired from her thirtieth dead-end job, decides to set up a recruitment agency of her own, running it from her kitchen with her friend and flatmate Rose (Juliet Ellis). Angie is able to build a successful business, while also dealing with a neglected son who gets in trouble at school and parents who disapprove of her venture. She also has to keep reassuring Rose that they will become legitimate once the business is on a firm financial footing - they do not have a licence, but Angie at least insists on only hiring workers with papers, not illegal immigrants.

The Speed of Thought

Wasn’t it just eight years ago that Nick Stahl was being groomed for Hollywood stardom, and started off his campaign with a major starring role in “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines”? Nowadays you’ll find the former John Connor plying his trade on a variety of direct-to-DVD movies, having produced an astounding eight — count’em, eight — movies in 2010 alone. Mind you, we’re not talking about cameos here; Stahl was the male lead in five of those titles, and had worthy supporting roles in the rest. Stahl already has five titles upcoming in 2011, including a regular gig on the TV show “Locke and Key”. Evan Oppenheimer’s “The Speed of Thought” is one of Stahl’s 2011 offering, and although moderately budgeted, was surprisingly quite good.

Stahl plays Joshua Lazarus, a telepath (or “scoper” in the movie’s parlance) who works for the U.S. Government (run by “Fringe’s” Blair Brown) in order to help pay the bills at an orphanage for similarly gifted kids run by the kindly Sandy (the inconceivable Wallace Shawn). Sandy’s mansion is like Professor Charles Xavier’s of “X-Men” fame, but instead of guys who can make snowballs and run through walls, these little tykes can all read your minds. Being that they’re quite dangerous unsupervised, the Guv’ment have made a cushy deal with Sandy whereby he supplies them with, essentially, spies for various bad deeds around the world. Human wiretaps without all that warrant baggage, if you will.

The Girlfriend Experience

Steven Soderbergh makes two kinds of movies -- the Hollywood kind and the indie kind. Though let's be straight here: Even Soderbergh's indie films are essentially Hollywood. There's no risk involved with them from a financial perspective, and from the creative side they continue to lend the filmmaker the artsy street cred that allows him to go off and make big fluff films like Ocean's Whatever with impunity.

The Girlfriend Experience comes from the indie side of Soderbergh, a low-budget, quickly-made digital picture starring a cast of non-movie stars (though, in this case, not necessarily non-stars, depending on your knowledge of porn). It's far more enigmatic and challenging than any wide release multiplex picture you'll see these days, but does that automatically mean that it's better than those Hollywood types of movies?

Skinwalkers

No subset of the horror genre has created a higher percentage of dogs than the werewolf movie. Since The Wolf Man reached screens in 1941, it has become possible to count the number of good films about lycanthropy on the fingers of one hand. The problem with most werewolf movies isn't that they're derivative - that's pretty much a given when one considers the inherent limitations - but that they're badly written, badly acted, or just plain silly. Skinwalkers hits the trifecta: all three apply. It stands alongside this year's other werewolf disaster, Blood and Chocolate, in illustrating why the moon should set on the werewolf movie.

Max Manus: Man of War

An explosive, adrenaline pumping thrill-ride from start to finish, this is the incredible true story of Max Manus - leader of the irrepressible Oslo Gang, whose urban guerrilla war against occupying Nazi Germany helped free their country and establish Max as a living legend. Stunning visual effects combine with an engrossing, absorbing and uniquely moving storyline that will leave you in no doubt that this is one of the greatest war movies of all time.

LD 50 Lethal Dose

Re-formed by a coded message to their web site, a group of animal rights activists set off to free an imprisoned colleague from a terrifying ordeal. Their rescue mission leads them to a disused lab, but what should have been a simple raid turns into a series of twisted and mind bending incidents where the free and the caged switch places, in this tormented psychological horror.

Shopgirl

Shopgirl, directed by Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie) from a screenplay by Steve Martin (adapting his novella), ventures into Lost in Translation territory. Although the relationships in this film are overtly romantic and sexual (as opposed to what was simmering beneath the surface in Translation), there's the same sense of longing and poignancy, and a recognition of spirits touching, then passing by. This is a smart, adult romance that rarely panders to clichés, and gives up the heady bliss of most such movies in favor of something bittersweet.